


Espresso Shots

by black_ink_tide



Series: 'Coffee, Blackverse' [3]
Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Alphabet Meme, Angst, D/s, Drabbles, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-07
Updated: 2012-02-25
Packaged: 2017-10-29 03:41:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 26
Words: 18,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_ink_tide/pseuds/black_ink_tide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a great character exploration meme on tumblr started where you pick a character that you hold dear, and write something for each letter in the alphabet. So... here be the drabbles for Fen (from my Coffee, Black DA-AU) A to Z.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A is for Anaphylactic Shock

“ _Rainy?_ ”

He’s seven and she’s nine.

“Rainy.”

He says her name again, but she can’t answer.

 _She can’t even breathe._

They’ve been alone in the house all afternoon, since school ended and she walked him home. She’s limp on the porch like a rag-doll. He’s sitting in the doorway, keeping the door open with his body, folded in on himself because Rainy can’t breathe and can’t talk and can’t tell him what to do.

The TV is on inside, _Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles_ , but it sounds so far away.

And there aren’t any grown ups here to help.

She reaches for him, her cool pale hand closing around his thin dark wrist and he sees it.

 _A bee! A bee is in her arm._

A little yellow and black bee, stuck to her skin like a burr on the dog they had at the last house.

And he knows what to do.

Leto _knows_ because the school nurse had told him, shown him.

That pretty school nurse with pretty blue eyes. He’d been too shy to look at her for too long, but he listened to everything she said, because she told him that he needed to know, because someday it might save his sister.

 _His Rainy._

The school nurse had shown him how to open the little needle. She said the one she had wouldn’t stick him but a real one would. She opened it and brought it against his thigh while he sat on the cot in her office. He’d jumped, because Leto never liked people touching him and he wasn’t expecting her to do that; Rainy had giggled behind her hands.

Inside the pen was medicine would save his Rainy. He knows where it is. He runs inside and gets it, the screen door shutting between them.

He thinks about the pretty school nurse’s hands as he opens it, kneeling next to Rainy who is so, so quiet but still awake. He injects it into Rainy’s thigh, through her jeans, just like the nurse had taught him to. He had paid attention. He had to.

Because even then he knew that there wasn’t going to be anyone else to save her.

…

“ _Oh, fuck._ ”

He’s standing up, and then in a second, he isn’t.

“Garrett?” I can’t see him; he went down behind the island in the kitchen.

I move fast because this is wrong.

He said _oh, fuck_ and then is quiet. No explanation. No laugh. Nothing. And his voice sounded off.

 _Wrong._

He just folded and went down and he’s so quiet now that I can’t even hear him breathing.

 _Because he isn’t breathing, Fen; he isn’t breathing._

“Garrett, look at me!”

He tries to.

Fuck.

He can’t tell me, can’t look, can’t breathe.

“What—”

He shifts one long leg under me, bends the knee, and I look down. He’s barefoot. And in the arch of his foot—

I’m up, because I _know_ he keeps one in the kitchen where he keeps the asprin and the cough drops – the medicine.

“Look at me,” I’m trying to sound calm, because he’s pale and tight and can’t focus. _Don’t die, Garrett, I’m right here, it’s right here._

I uncap the epipen and drop the cap coming back down next to him and hold it against the side of his thigh, activate, and wait for it to inject.

He reels forward when it does, _relief_ , and his head collides with my chest.

I have to hold this here, in place, and I do, but I try to hold him too. Hold on to him.

I count. Seconds that seem too long. I pull it away from him and I rub the injection site with my fingertips.

He breathes against me, shuddering, tight gasps of air.

The bee. I reach down and scrape it out of his skin. It’s a warm day and we left the windows open. It came in, was on the kitchen floor. He stepped on it. _A fucking bee in the fucking kitchen._

“You’re okay, I’m here, I’m right here,” I hold on to him, just him, but I need to get him up, because he needs to go to the ER; he’s breathing but this isn’t done yet.

He’d told me he was allergic. That he’s very allergic. It’s worse than Rainy, it happened faster. _I was losing him faster._

“Hawke,” I bury my nose in his hair for a second; he smells like panic and he grips me, holds onto me, “You’re okay, Hawke, I’ve got you. We have to get up. Now. Can you stand up?”

He grunts and I help get him up, slowly, because his blood pressure is too low, wrong.

He’s heavy, shaking from deep inside. _Hawke. I’ve got you._

I call Leandra from the hospital. I sound so much calmer than I feel.

When she comes through the doors she hugs me. Tight. Without hesitation.

“He’s okay,” I tell her, bringing my arms up around her, patting her back – she smells like honey.

She pulls back after a moment and kisses my temple and says _thank you_ but she doesn’t need to say that. Not to me.

We go in to see him together. He’s comfortable. _Safe._ His foot it swollen and he’s hooked up to an IV and I can’t look at the place where the needle disappears into his skin.

But he’s smiling.

There’s a TV on in the room. I glance at it while Leandra is fussing sweetly about his pillows and asking him what the fuck he was thinking stepping on a goddamn bee.

It’s _The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles_. On the TV. With the volume down low.

I let out a breath and think about that pretty blue-eyed school nurse because she’s easier to think about than Rain is. _I haven’t thought about her for so long._

“Fen.”

He says my name and I turn back to him.

And I smile.


	2. B is for Bastard.

He’s nine years old when he looks up the word.

He stole the dictionary from the school library two schools ago. He likes sitting up at night and reading the words he doesn’t know, words that he likes that no one ever says out loud. _Anachronistic. Cimmerian. Wanderlust. Rampike._

Leto likes _knowing_ words far more than he likes using them.

Today, Rain called him something new. And the word stung even though he didn’t know what it meant. _No. He knew what it meant._ He knew because of the way she said it. He can hear the meaning in unfamiliar words the way that Rain can hear music in notes printed on paper.

He’s sitting in his bed with a flashlight and the big red dictionary spread across his lap.

His finger finds the word before his eyes do, because sometimes he can’t focus on things fast enough and sometimes he has to move closer to see, especially when it’s dark.

 

 _**bas·tard** _

noun

1\. a person born of unmarried parents; an illegitimate child.

2\. _Slang._

a. a vicious, despicable, or thoroughly disliked person: _Some bastard slashed the tires on my car._

b. a person, especially a man: _The poor bastard broke his leg._

3\. something irregular, inferior, spurious, or unusual.

4\. illegitimate in birth.

5\. spurious; not genuine; false: _The architecture was bastard Gothic._

6\. of abnormal or irregular shape or size; of unusual make or proportions: _bastard quartz; bastard mahogany._

 

Leto reads all of the definitions, sounding out the words that he doesn’t know already. Then he looks them up. Sounds them out again, his voice very quiet in a very quiet house. Not even a whisper.

He could guess what those words meant before looking them up, though. They were all hard words. _Inferior. Spurious. Despicable. Illegitimate._

Rain had a different dad. He never knew him. He left when Leto was born.

 _Not when_ , Rain told him, _because._

…

“Ahh!!” he’s tilting my phone, looking at his reflection in the screen, “You didn’t tell me!”

I laugh; he’s not really bothered, “Stop. Come here. Let me help you.”

Hawke sets down my phone and drops down onto the blanket with me, kneeling between my spread knees, “I can’t _believe_ you were just going to let me walk around like this all day.”

It’s warm. A sunny Tuesday and Hawke’s radiating heat through his t-shirt and his jeans. I feel it against the inside of my thighs as he crawls over me. His hips pin mine and I exhale, reaching for his jaw.

“Bastard,” I feel him say softly as he leans in, as he kisses my neck.

The park is quiet, mostly empty, and he had to get out of the apartment. He said he felt cagey -- he’s been painting a lot lately and selling pieces. It makes him feel productive and accomplished but at the cost of feeling like a shut-in.

I’ve gotten used to seeing him spattered all the time. Blues. Greens. Black. White. Red today, across the bridge of his nose.

I noticed, he didn’t.

 _Until he did._

He pulls back and I rub at the paint with my index finger.

“It won’t come off now like that,” he sighs, smiling, dry paint crinkling but not cracking, “I’m stuck like this.”

“Forever?”

He chuckles, “Maybe.”

“I kind of like it," I shrug, "Suits you.”

He laughs and rolls to the side and we lay there, staring up through the leaves.

I close my eyes. On the inside of my eyelids I see the pattern of shifting amber light through green leaves.

And red paint.

And black words printed on thin white paper.


	3. C is for Candle.

He is eleven years old when he wakes up in a hospital for the first time.

He knows that there are other people in the room and he doesn’t want them to know that he’s awake because they’re going to want to talk to him more. And his back hurts and he doesn’t want to talk.

Talking about it makes it real.

A nurse wakes him up (he was really asleep this time, sometime, between dinner and now). Her hands are gentle and even though Leto doesn’t like to be touched, it feels okay when she touches him. She peels back the pad of gauze taped to his shoulder, cleans the cut, and replaces the gauze.

And then she asks him if he wants to walk around. She asks him the way that an adult asks another adult something, and he turns his head to look at her. He nods.

She gives him a bathrobe to wear and it’s too big. The sleeves end way past his fingers and she kneels in front of him, rolling them up. He thinks that she must have kids, because she knows exactly how to do this.

It’s very late, and as they walk the oval loop around the nurse’s station in the middle of the floor, he hears the other patients snoring, or the beeping of monitors, the sound of machines. She doesn’t talk or expect him to talk, this nurse with smooth dark skin and short hair and a thin gold chain around her neck and they keep walking until they pass a room with a cross on the door. He stops.

“You want to go in, sweetheart?”

He nods and she pushes the door open for him. It’s quiet and smells like the rest of the hospital but there’s supposed to be God in this room.

He looks for Him, but as far as Leto can tell it’s just another empty room in a hospital at night.

The nurse stands next to him with her hands folded in front of her and her eyes closed.

He steps towards the little white candles. He knows what they mean. He read about this. _Prayers_ to him are like all the places he’s read about but never seen.

He wants to light one but she doesn’t have a match and there aren’t any out.

The nurse tells him that they can just pretend to light it; It’ll mean the same thing. God understands.

Leto doesn’t know if He does. Or if He’s real.

Or if he’s just alone now, now that Rain did what she did.

 _She cut him._

 _With scissors._

He won’t be able to use the real word for it for a long time.

 _Cut_ is easier to say.

 _Cut_ doesn’t go as deep as _stab_.

He blinks fast and takes the candle from the nurse’s hand.

They won’t be together anymore. His sister is far away from him. Separated. Gone.

He says his first and last prayer that night, holding an unlit candle. For his sister.

…

I walk in but the place is quiet and dark.

It’s not late so I expected him to be awake, on the couch, with a pizza. That was, I had been lead to believe, the plan.

But the couch is empty and the TV is off. And there is no pizza.

“Hawke?”

“Hey.”

He’s in the bathroom.

In the bath.

I push the door open and drop my bag outside in the hall, “You look a little big for that tub, Hawke.”

 _Fuck, he’s beautiful. Wet hair on wet skin. His cock, half-hard in the water._

 _Fuck, Hawke._

More than anything, it’s those eyes smiling. _It’s always those eyes._

The bathroom is humid and dark, just lit by candles. A lot of them. Scattered all over the available flat surfaces in the room.

“I’m not _that_ big.”

I laugh, “Yes. You _are_.”

He wrinkles his nose, “There is _plenty_ of room in here, Fen.”

I blink at him. All of him.

“You’re… you want me to…”

He smiles and sits up, water dripping from his shoulders, “I opened a bottle of wine.”

There are two glasses classily waiting on the closed toilet lid.

“I can see that.”

Those eyes, though. I give in. I strip while he watches me, mouth curling and blue eyes dark in the candlelight.

I get in – he gives me what he calls the “good side” wedging himself in, somehow, against the end of the tub with the faucet.

It feels good despite the water being almost too hot. And despite it being so damn cramped, feels good with our legs together, Hawke’s long body, the shape of his cock underwater a shadow that I’ll wrap my fingers and lips and tongue around tonight, and his voice echoing on tiles all around me.

One candle by the sink burns out as he’s talking, sending a thin white column of smoke up towards the ceiling. For whatever reason it strikes me how easily, quietly, _unnoticed_ , that change happens – how a lit candle changes into one that can never be lit again. I watch it as if it means _something_ and sip my wine while Hawke’s wet finger idly traces a design above my knee.


	4. D is for Dropcloth.

When Leto Aucoin is twelve years old, he knows that he cannot draw.

He’s in a sixth grade classroom in Louisiana, holding a piece of paper he’s ruined, when he understands this in the same way that he understands that he has green eyes (like his mother), black hair (like his father) and a long straight nose (just like his sister).

Once a week, an art teacher comes to their class. He is _strange_. Different. He talks about _color_ and _light_ and _shapes_ and _shading_. Leto likes that this man is strange. Leto likes that when he talks, he uses hands with long fingers crusted with layers of paint and charcoal to explain things in the air in front of himself. And that he has an earring in one ear and a shark tooth on a piece of leather around his throat.

He likes that his eyes are sky-light blue and that his eyelashes are dark black and thick.

Leto _likes_ him.

He thinks about him when he isn’t there, in the classroom. He thinks about him when he’s falling asleep at night and when he does, he smells paint and the musty dropcloth that the art teacher brings with him every week.

The dropcloth is nothing special. It’s just a big piece of fabric (what Leto thought at first was a _tarp_ but what the art teacher tells him is _canvas_ ). He spreads it out on the floor of the classroom when they’ve all pushed their desks to the edges of the room. They paint there, on the cloth on the floor, sharing pots of bright, rainbow colored paints in jars. But they each get their own paper. Sometimes their own square canvases.

Leto cannot draw. And he cannot paint. Nothing looks the way that it’s supposed to.

The art teacher sits next to him, Indian-style, and tells him that there isn’t a wrong way to make art – that’s just the way that he, that Leto, sees the apple. Or the chair. Or the tree.

One day, the last day he sees the art teacher, the man tells him that what he thinks Leto sees, what he’s painting and drawing, is the light. He tells him that’s important. That a lot of people never notice the light at all, because they’re only looking at the form. The object. The thing but not the space around it.

He doesn’t really believe him, he thinks he’s just being nice, but still Leto feels something tight and hot and strange in his stomach sitting there with the man next to him, talking about the _light_.

It’s the first time he’s ever felt this and he doesn’t entirely know what it is yet… but it feels _good_. He knows it’s not something he should talk to anyone else about. It’s private. His. He want to protect that tight hot strange feeling in his stomach and he wants that feeling more.

Again.

…

Hawke is tight.

Not just inside, not just _in_ , but everywhere. Tense. Tight. With his head back, under me, breathing in shallow, shuddering time with me.

 _And then he gives. Fuck._

 _This._

 _This is Hawke_. That moment that he gives in, under me, gives in to me, not because I force him to, not because he has to. He gives in, under, around me, _to me_ because he wants to.

I’m fucking him on the floor of the studio.

He sits on the floor when he paints, with the canvas propped against the wall.

The shape of him, all that height curled in, focused on painting. On color, on blending, on shadow and mood and the edges of things that he sees in a white canvas.

I watched him from the kitchen.

Watched.

Until watching wasn’t enough.

He’s on his back on the floor. On his dropcloth.

His legs are bent, braced against my arms. So much leg.

He says my name, lifting his head off of the canvas to push his forehead against mine and I do, I push against him, close my eyes and _fuck_ him, my fingers digging into the layers of dry paint and stiff cloth under his body.

 _I want this. More of this._

 _I want to protect this._

 _More._

 _Again._


	5. E is for Effortless.

He’s thirteen when he figures out that he’s charming.

This family is fine; they don’t expect much from him and they don’t talk. He shows up to meals on time with clean hands and that makes _her_ happy. He does chores before he’s asked to and that makes _him_ happy. There’s another boy in the house. Nothing makes him happy but that’s not Leto’s problem.

He comes here to the hospital courtyard after school. Sometimes during school.

There’s a fountain and some grass and stone benches with engraved names. People come out here to get better, to get sunshine and fresh air, to wait, or to mourn.

Leto comes here to _lie_.

He feels charged, like there’s electricity in his arms and his chest and his brain, because people believe him.

 _He says that his mother is inside having a baby._

 _He says that his brother broke his arm._

 _He says that his father is dying from lung cancer._

He lies, with clean hands, and people believe him.

And sometimes for a few minutes, he believes himself; it feels good to have a mother, a brother, a _father_.

Once he tells a boy his age that his sister almost drown and that’s why he’s here.

The boy looks tired, pale and redheaded and awkward in a way that Leto has never been awkward.

The boy says his father is dying, slowly, And that’s why he’s here. There’s a specialist here, at this hospital. He uses phrases like 'last hope' and 'best option' and 'god's hands.'

Leto watches him, observes his _honesty_. He’ll practice it later, the way that this boy moves and stutters and blinks, when he’s alone in the bathroom while the shower runs.

But he also _listens_. Really. A part of him does.

The courtyard is empty except for them.

 _Leto feels something electric but it isn’t his lie._

When he kisses that boy, he does it honestly.

When he slips the five dollar bill from the boy’s pocket that’s honest too. It its own way.

Both acts are effortless.

…

He’s drunk. He holds eye contact with people for longer when he’s drunk, he touches more, holds things in his fingers longer and he _leans_.

We’re on the pub's roof and it’s crowded. We came to support Isabela.

 _It’s just bad timing and he wasn’t going to just stay home today._

He doesn’t call it an anniversary, because that sounds too pleasant.

Hawke just calls today by its calendar date, nothing else. _May First._

He’s talking to Merrill, leaning in towards her, holding his drink with both hands.

He’s been quiet tonight. _Well. Quiet for him._

I watch him from across the roof. He finishes that drink and looks towards the bar for the next one but when he looks up, he finds me.

 _He wants to go home but he doesn’t want to be where it’s quiet._

We stay and he drinks until he’s leaning more than standing. When he leads me inside, he pushes me into a corner where he leans over me and says nothing.

I don't say anything either but kiss him back when he kisses me.

 _As soon as it’s quiet he won’t be able to think about anything but his dad._

He doesn’t say that. He doesn't say anything.

I read him.

It’s just effortless.


	6. F is for Fair.

He’s fourteen and he’s about to die.

It’s never even occurred to him before this, before right now, that he _could_ die. Not even when this boy who is three years older than him had his hand ( _which is fucking bigger than Leto’s entire neck_ ) pinned hard and heavy against the soft part of his throat. The part where the air comes in.

He caught him stealing money from the other side of the room that they share and this isn’t the first time. He’s been here before with his hand on his throat.

He figured out a long time ago that this is what _scares_ Leto.

When he can’t breathe, he thinks about Rain, _when her throat was so swollen than she couldn’t breathe or say ‘help’._

He thinks of his father, _the only memory he has of him, coughing red blood into his hand._

The boy presses harder and Leto hears something _pop._

Everything is black at the edges. It's going too far this time, further than last time.

 _He’s dying. Right now._

 _He got caught. Maybe it’s only fair._

But the last thing he thinks before everything goes black is _No._

 _No. This is not fucking **fair** at all._

…

To be honest, neither one of us is interested in the mid-state fair.

I hate it, actually.

Hawke wanted to come for two reasons – the food and the people watching.

It’s after dark now and we’re meandering past the livestock pavilion (Hawke was interested enough to go in and look at _a_ pig; one horrible pig later and he was done with the pavilion as a whole) and finally talking about going back to the hotel when his cell phone rings.

He answers it with one hand, holding a churro ( _his third one_ ) in the other hand.

“Hey, Bethy!” he smiles broadly. She’s still in Italy but her year abroad is technically over, “What time is it there?”

I smile; For all the things that Hawke is brilliant at, he has a surprisingly limited sense of _time_. It doesn't matter that Bethany's been in Italy for over a year, or if I've been in Reykjavik or London or Prague for a month, he starts every international phone call with a greeting and, _'What time is it there?'_

He bites off the end of his churro then offers the rest to me. I decline.

 _I hate the fair. I hate the noise, the food, and the music, and the midway and… Jesus Christ, I hate livestock._

"Ah," He shrugs and takes another bite, “No, we're at the fair. Right? What’s going on?”

He’s stopped walking.

I stop too.

“ _What?_ ”

He’s pulled in a lungful of air and it holding on to it.

I watch his face as he listens to the phone clutching the churro and plugging his ear to hear her better, “I don’t… you’re _what_?”

He’s focused on the ground, on the disgusting wet pavement under our feet for a long time, listening to her, nodding silently, "Yeah. Yeah. Have you..." he listens to her for a long time and finally looks up at me, blinking, looking equal parts _terrified_ and _delighted_ , “Yeah, he's right here. Fen?”

“Yes?”

“I need you to take the phone and talk to Bethany because she’s pregnant and keeping the baby," he hands me the phone, "and I need to sit down.”


	7. G is for German.

When Leto is fifteen he only speaks German.

He didn’t speak at all after everything went black in a bedroom he never saw again.

They told him that he had a laryngeal fracture.

They tell him that the scar where they opened his throat so he could breathe will hardly be noticeable at all.

They keep telling him that he’s lucky.

Other boys’ voices change that year but when he has a voice again his isn’t changed, he knows, it’s _broken_. At first it’s hoarse, flat, and he can’t control it at all so he stays quiet.

Eventually it sounds smoother but not smooth; he doesn’t sound like anyone else. He never will again.

They put him back in school and on the first day he decides that if he’s going speak, he might as well speak German because it’s a language that sounds _right_ in this voice.

He sits in the back of his classes at a this new school and learns the language from a book; when he doesn’t know the German word for an answer, he just says nothing.

The teachers eventually stop calling on him and some of the kids think he’s a foreign exchange student.

The Russian foreign exchange student he sits next to in geometry knows that he isn’t.

Her name is Stella.

He loses his virginity to her on the band room floor behind a drum during the lunch hour on a Friday. She’s seventeen and beautiful and she tells him that his voice makes her _wet_. He watches her fingers as she makes herself come in the band room, in the parking lot, in the bedroom at her host family’s house. He uses his fingers to make her come in the biology lab and in the parking lot.

He makes her come with his tongue in the bedroom at her host family’s house.

When Leto is sixteen, he only speaks Russian.

…

“Well, look at you!” Isabela pulls on his suspenders and then reaches up for Hawke’s cheeks, “You’re just fucking adorable.”

I wonder if she notices the flush in his skin the way I do. If she feels it.

I can’t see anything but that — the blush on his chest, his throat, his cheeks.

I still feel it in my palms, my lips, my skin. Him.

“Look at you!” he says glancing down while she’s still squeezing his face, “Look at them.”

Isabela is wearing a dirndl. A very… fitted dirndl.

We have been dragged, or rather enthusiastically invited, to Kirkwall’s version of Oktoberfest tonight. It’s… festive.

“Oh, this old thing?” she lets him go, she kisses my cheek, “I just had it lying around. Andy’s getting seats figured out. You want to go in? When did you get here?”

“Ahh…” he looks at me, smiling and blinking fast, “a… while ago.”

That’s true. A while ago we arrived. Too early. This restaurant is in the hills outside the city so rather than waiting in the parking lot, Hawke had suggested that we drive around and maybe try to find somewhere to park near the creek and then walk around.

“Or something.”

We never made it out of the car.

It was hot, fast, _fun_. Like being sixteen.

I was in his lap in the backseat when I came, my cock and my hip in his hands.

He was close, _shaking_ , with his cock in my hand when he asked me to _talk_ to him.

I did. In German.

“Uh- _huh_ …” Isabela looks from him to me, because she knows and because he’s what he calls, _loved-up_ and giddy and smiling with messy hair. Everywhere. _Completely obvious, Hawke._

“Well, the accordion and massive quantities of beer beckon,” she smirks and bends her elbow at me and I get the idea and take it while Hawke shoulders the door open for both of us.

He laughed after he came and I can still feel that laugh in my palms, my lips, my skin.

I realize as we walk inside that I might be a little loved-up too.


	8. H is for Heroes.

He’s seventeen years old and sitting in the front seat of his sister’s car.

She’s nineteen and it’s the last time he’ll see her but he doesn’t know that.

It’s raining hard and they’re sitting in the car outside a liquor store in Baton Rouge at night.

She turns up the radio. Her fingernails are chipped silver and short, like little broken claws.

He didn’t want to see her but Serendipity talked him into it when he showed up at her house this morning angry, _fucking pissed off_. His eyes and his brain and his chest felt hot and he kicked her fence because he had to do something; there are still white paint chips embedded in the toe of his boot.

“You’ll regret it if you don’t, Leto,” she had said, holding his face, “she’s your _family_ , don’t throw that away like it doesn’t matter.”

 _When he met Serendipity she was named Brian._

 _They were both lonely until each other._

He’s seventeen and he thinks he might love her but he doesn’t know how to say that, or how to say a lot of things, so he listens instead.

He listened to her today and now he’s here, sitting in his sister’s car while she grips the steering wheel and stares ahead.

Rain tells him that she’s moving to Chicago.

He nods. He thinks that she’s going to say something else, _more_ , but she doesn’t.

Instead they just sit there, in silence, listening to David Bowie in the dark.

…

 _Hawke sings._

He sings fairly often but he’s always quick to cringe and say how awful he sounds.

 _He doesn’t sound awful._ His voice is… pleasant, even off-key.

He’ll sing in front of the others, usually while drinking, and usually _Lady Gaga. Or Rihanna. Queen._

And his musical taste is… varied. In the moving process, while going through Hawke’s closet, Andy had unearthed a shoebox full of his old mix CD’s. Hawke had wasted no time in putting the least scratched one on and singing along with what he’d labeled in his teen years, his _‘sweet slow-jams.’_

And he’s _funny_ when he does it. And happy. He doesn’t take himself seriously… he _does_ it to make us laugh. He’ll sing while driving, doing the dishes, folding his laundry. This week he had Leandra in hysterics as he sang _Born This Way_ while attempting, unsuccessfully, to unclog her bathroom sink.

 _Hawke is singing. Now._

The apartment is quiet and I hear him from the kitchen when I turn off the sink, putting the last plate on the rack to dry next to a glass bottle. He’s not being funny.

It’s the first time I think I’ve ever heard him like this, not trying to make up for what he thinks his singing lacks, not being self-deprecating about it, not cringing. Just… singing. Because he’s singing for _her._

Bethany had paused in the kitchen today before leaving her with us for the weekend.

She was looking at Hawke who was standing by the couch. He was holding Grier, who is so impossibly _small_ in his hands, in his arms, so that she could safely see all three of the dogs as they were crowding around his legs, excited to see her.

She giggled and squealed happily and he laughed, looking up at both of us and smiling.

“God,” Bethany said quietly to me, “he looks so _much_ like Dad.”

He’s giving Grier a bath with his back to the open bathroom door and singing, quietly, sincerely, happily.

Heroes. By David Bowie.

Softly off-key.


	9. I is for Indestructible.

He’s eighteen years old when his mother dies.

He hasn’t seen her for twelve years by that time but it doesn’t matter because something inside _changes_ when he gets that phone call.

He misses her in a way that he can’t describe.

The hospital where she lived contacts him because they can’t reach Rain and there’s no one else.

Leto can’t.

Can’t answer their questions.

Can’t go there for belongings.

Can’t remember her face.

Can’t reconcile the fact that the idea of _his family_ died with his mother.

Can’t tell this person that he loves, that he lives with, that he loves her.

Can’t know for certain that the things that were broken inside his mother’s head aren’t broken in his, too.

Can’t remember the night before.

Can’t remember what he took, smoked, drank.

Can’t remember this girl’s name, the skinny one he fucks in a bathroom stall.

Or the boy that he wakes up next to.

Can’t care that Serendipity leaves telling him that she can’t watch him do this; _that he’s not indestructible._

He can’t know for certain that he isn’t indestructible because _none_ of it’s killed him yet.

He can’t stop testing.

Pushing.

Maybe the thing that will break is already inside his head and it doesn’t matter and he can’t stop.

Can’t stay.

He can’t.

So he doesn’t.

…

She’s crying _pitifully_ as I carry her to Leandra’s porch, her face hot and wet against the front of my shirt, “My knee…”

She fell chasing Paul who was following me out to the car and is now following closely at my heels guiltily; it was a pretty hard fall and her knee is scraped, red and full of gravel.

“En Francais?”

Grier is three now and, at Bethany’s request, we are trying to get as many languages in during this developmental window as possible.

Bethany teaches her Italian.

Andy claimed Polish.

I ended up with French and some Icelandic (which Hawke is also learning, at a slightly slower rate).

It’s been incredible to see how much she retains; Grier Malcolm Hawke is, I genuinely believe, brilliant.

She heaves a sigh, putting her arms around my neck and huffing, “Mon genou.”

“Très bien.”

It’s Christmas Eve and the house is surprisingly warm when I push the door open with my hip, letting Paul in first before carrying her into the laundry room where I know, _now_ , Leandra keeps the first aid kid.

Hawke’s head pops out of the kitchen, “What happened?”

“Big G!” she reaches for him and he comes over, quickly taking her from my arms and giving me a look, but, it’s hard to take anyone with that much flour on his face seriously.

He’s been on me lately about carrying her. There is a weight restriction on what I’m _allowed_ to lift and Grier now exceeds that limit; Hawke cares, a lot, but I don’t.

“Mon genou!” she points to her knee where the ripped hole in her tights reveals the scrape.

He sits her down on the dryer and quickly cleans and covers the scrape while I try to divert her attention with more vocabulary.

By the time Bethany and Leandra return from an emergency grocery run, she’s forgotten about the pain but is proud to show off the _four_ dinosaur band-aids Hawke put on her knee.

I smile, watching her take Bethany’s hand as she guides her to go show off to Merrill and Bela and Gilly.

“You need to stop lifting her, Fen.”

Hawke’s behind me, tucking his chin on my shoulder and, I know, getting flour on the back of my shirt.

“I don’t mind,” _She’s three and my family and I’m going to carry her when she needs to be carried_ , "It's fine."

He sighs, kissing the side of my neck, “You’re not indestructible.”

I shrug, leaning into him, “That remains to be seen, Hawke.”


	10. J is for Jacket.

He’s twenty years old when his back breaks.

He wakes up.

Strapped down.

Days later.

They say his name to him and shine a light in his eyes.

They know who he is even when he doesn’t because he had an ID card in the pocket of the jacket he was wearing before, _during_ , after the fight.

 _No, he doesn’t remember anything._

Doesn’t know faces or names.

Or where they left him.

He won’t ever know anything except that he _lost_.

 _No_ , he says, _there isn’t anyone to call._

They give him his jacket back. There’s blood on the lining but it isn’t torn.

He’s twenty years old alone in a bed staring at the ceiling, counting zipper teeth over and over with his fingernail.

He’s holding his jacket in his hands when they tell him about his skull and the metal they put in his back.

He’s wearing that jacket when he gets up, stands up, and walks. It’s hard to put on without twisting, without the room _tilting_ , but he does it.

He’s wearing that jacket when he looks in the mirror and sees the long clotted line where he used to have thick black hair.

He’s wearing that jacket when he goes outside for the first time.

He’s wearing that jacket when Dan lights his cigarette, cupping his hands around the flame.

Leto’s wearing that jacket when he inhales.

Still wearing it when he exhales smoke saying, “ _Leto_ ,” out-loud like he’s agreeing to something instead of just answering a question.

…

 _Hawke talks in his sleep._

He doesn’t always use real words, but sometimes he does. And he’s usually worried. Worried about Bethany, Grier, or Carver, his mother, the dogs.

Me.

He’s asleep in the passenger seat, wearing his jacket zipped up for warmth with his hands buried in the pockets.

“Babe,” he’s worried, frowning, “what kind of coffee?”

I clear my throat – we’ve been driving in shifts and he’s been asleep for all of my shift; he slept through the sunrise.

“ _Babe?_ ”

“Ahh,” he won’t remember anything I say, I’ve learned over time, “Chicory.”

“I don’t _have_ it.”

“That’s okay, Hawke.”

He mumbles softly and unintelligibly for a while. The sound is comforting; I’m so used to it now, it just sounds like home. He’s quiet as I drive over the state-line and quiet until he smiles, _smiles_ and says, “I have the cards, Dad, I have ‘em. You should stay here, Dad. I cleaned the garage. You can stay with us. Fen?”

I look at him.

His hands are out of the pockets and instead he’s gripping the bottom edge of the jacket, holding on tight with those broad pale hands. I answer him, like I always do, “He can stay with us.”

“I have your cards.”

He usually talks in his sleep when he’s worried. Sometimes he does it when he’s happy or excited.

Sometimes I think he’s trying to finish a conversation that he can’t finish when he’s awake.


	11. K is for Kick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning - So… we’re at the Dan-stage here, and everything that entails.
> 
> D/s that isn’t really the happy kind of D/s.
> 
> You know what I mean. Just a heads up to be on the safe side.

He’s twenty-one years old.

 _He won’t look away._

He’s twenty-one years old on his hands and knees being fucked.

 _He won’t look away from Dan’s face._

He’s twenty-one years old on his hands and knees being fucked from behind by the man Dan _hugged_ when the elevator door in the loft opened this morning.

 _He won’t look away from Dan’s face because he said, “Don’t look away.”_

They were spending a quiet morning together, smoking and reading and listening to music, when _he_ came in.

Dan hadn’t told him before that this would happen today. He hugged this man and then came back to Leto to touch his cheek lightly and say, then, calmly, “Look at _me_ when he fucks _you_.”

Dan’s dressed and sitting on the couch with his hand over his mouth, watching.

 _And Leto won’t look away from his face._

Even when the man goes too deep, or too hard.

Even when Leto wants him to stop.

Even when Leto’s instinct tells him to _kick_ , pull away, stop.

Leto’s never liked to be fucked but he won’t look away.

Because Dan told him not to.

And he wants to be good.

…

I finish before he does so I watch him.

They had strongly suggested to me that I should do more on my own now, build ‘core strength’ outside of physical therapy, and do it somewhere with, _‘professionals’_.

So now we go to the gym. _‘We’_ because Hawke comes with me, four days a week; Hawke started swimming again while I’m upstairs with the obnoxiously upbeat _‘professionals’_ being watched and coddled.

I summarily hate the gym, and would rather not come at all. I miss running outside, just, _running_ without other people, without equipment or LED numbers and countdowns or TV’s or inspirational posters and pictures of food groups in silver frames.

The impact from running is too much for my back now and _I can’t_.

I’m angry about it, but, _I can’t._

This is good for my body, I know that, but it doesn’t feel _good_ the way that running in the sun, in the rain, listening to just the sound of my own breathing on quiet mornings _felt_.

I just get through it, let them watch and encourage me and, when I finish before he does, come down and watch him swim laps.

Hawke flipturns at the other end of the pool and glides underwater back towards me, propelling himself forward with long smooth kicks.

I lean forward, elbows on thighs, and I watch him; the arch of his arms as he pulls himself forward, the strength of muscles he’s rediscovered, the density of his thighs, his arms, his chest; _that’s changed_.

He’s not fast but he is precise, focused in what we’ve both decided is uncharacteristic calm on the form of each stroke, each kick.

He comes up in front of me, holding onto the edge of the pool and wipes water from his eyes, “Hey!”

“Hey.”

“You’re done?”

I nod. Done and tired and ready to go home and get clean; I never shower here.

He pushes himself up, out of the water and stands up, tall and wet, lean but strong… dense, “How was it?”

I hated it and he knows that, “The same. Fine.”

He grabs a folded towel from the shelf and dries his chest, his stomach, his thighs and I feel a possessive sense of something like pride – the flex of muscle and the way that he moves, the memory buried in the muscles of his legs like instinct as he _kicks_ underwater, the pleasure that he’s found again in the power of his body.

A body that I unequivocally want to touch, take home, rediscover, feel, worship, _now_.

He notices me looking at him like that, with that focus, and he pauses, and that pause feels… charged. Understood. Good.

“Let me rinse off and let’s go eat,” he smiles at me, “I’m fucking starving.”


	12. L is for Leto.

He is twenty-one years old when he stops being _Leto_ and becomes a little wolf instead.

Dan collects things; fetishes, cultures, religions, mythologies… things that contradict each other, things from everywhere.

He takes pictures of things he can’t collect.

 _He tells Leto that he believes when you take a picture of someone, you take a piece of their soul as Leto stares into his lens and answers his questions._

 _Leto will never believe that camera has that kind of power._

Dan paid _them_ lots of money to come to this party because he loves _Natives_.

Leto is high, he’s been high all day. Dan’s focused on guests and doesn’t say much to Leto at all until the guests who are leaving leave and the guests who are staying the night, stay. Leto always knows where he is, though, a hot white blur in the corner of his eye.

He does hear him say that _Leto has Native blood_ , that he’s sure he does, _because of his bone-structure_.

That makes Leto _laugh_ and he doesn’t know why.

They dance, Dan’s _Natives_. Leto watches them and feels himself _drifting_. They are a blur of colors moving under bright lights and he goes somewhere else to the beat of their drum and he leaves his body behind because his body is Dan’s. That’s the first time he _knows_ that.

He goes somewhere without it and runs.

He knows, as he’s running, that he is a wolf, a white wolf running East, chasing a hawk’s shadow across soft green grass.

He runs all night.

He runs as a wolf until he runs right back inside his own body, sees through his own eyes; he is inside his body again when Dan fucks him in bed.

He tells Dan after he comes that he’s got a wolf inside now and Dan says that he thought something felt different.

Leto wakes up late the next day and on the pillow next to him is a small white wolf, carved out of stone.

A Zuni fetish. The first of two presents from Dan.

The wolf is still cool in his hand when Dan gives him the second present.

A new name.

 _Fenris_.

Because he is _Native_ and _Nordic, Creole, French, Irish, African_ , from _everywhere_ and _nowhere_ , because he’s a _wolf_ and because he is _his – Fenris, His Little Wolf._

…

There are three piles of mail in front of me on the kitchen island.

 _Garrett Hawke._

 _Leto Aucoin._

 _Fen Aucoin._

I like to sort it this way. It just makes sense.

Hawke reaches past me and picks up his own pile (credit card statement, health insurance information packet, flier from that grocery store he likes) and I hear just the drum-beat of whatever he’s listening to on his ipod before he carries his mail upstairs, the dogs following him like a pack leader as he goes.

I look at the two remaining piles of mail.

I _stare_ at the top letter in each pile for a long time, reading each letter of each name.

And then I push them together, pick them up _together_ , and follow him upstairs.


	13. M is for Myopic.

He is 22 years old when he _sees_ for the first time.

Dan is _healthy_. He eats organic food. He exercises, takes supplements, drinks lots of water, sees specialists.

He believes in _Eastern Medicine_ and he demands that the maids who clean his apartment sanitize everything, every surface, every _thing._

 _Use bleach if you have to._

Dan requires that everyone _he_ fucks, everyone who fucks _Fen_ , everyone Fen _fucks_ show him proof of a clean bill of health before they do anything.

And he is the only one allowed to come _inside_ of Fen.

He sends Fen to doctors, not just for his back; once a month he has a physical exam.

Has blood drawn.

Provides a urine sample.

Gets his cheek swabbed.

It’s a routine and he doesn’t mind.

He does this once a month because Dan doesn’t want to get _sick_.

 _Fen is healthy because of Dan._

 _Fen is better because of Dan._

 _He can **see** because of Dan._

Dan sends him to an optometrist who is shocked that he’d never worn glasses.

When he puts on his first pair, it’s so overwhelming that if he was alone he might have cried.

He’s not alone, so instead he lets his hands shake.

They walk through the park together, and he can see individual tree branches, crisp dark lines, and not just a blur of faded _tree_ and light.

The world does not look how he’s seen it.

His hands are still shaking so he puts them in his pockets and thinks about that art teacher who made his stomach feel tight and hot while Dan talks about dinner plans.

…

“How do I look?”

I squint and chuckle, “I think they’re a little narrow for your face.”

“Are you saying I have a wide face, Fen?” Hawke scoffs dramatically and blinks.

 _I can’t see all the details, even with him just across the table from me, but he looks fucking good in my glasses. Of course he does._

“I think you look quite scholarly, Garrett,” Merrill’s sitting next to me in the booth, reaching across the table to color with Grier on her paper place-mat.

“Yeah?” he smiles, focusing on her face with difficulty, “Like Professor Garrett Hawke?”

“Mmm!” she nods, “What would you be a professor of?”

“Etiquette and Naps. I’d do my post-doc in Sleeping in Hammocks.”

He leans and reaches for one of Grier’s discarded crayons and she looks up at him, giggling, “You look silly!”

“Oh yeah?” he leans in more.

“Yeah,” she reaches for the glasses, pulling them off his face and, immediately getting sticky little fingerprints on the lenses, “ _Fen’s_ glasses!”

The waiter sets down another bread basket between us as I watch the indistinct shape of Hawke carefully take my glasses back from her hands, distracting her by pretending to loudly gnaw on her ear. He wipes the lenses with his t-shirt before handing them back to me, “They look better on you, I’m sure.”

He tells me later that he can’t believe how strong the prescription is and kisses me, softly, like it’s something that’s been on his mind for a long time.


	14. N is for Not Enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning applies. D/s that has veered far from the fun path.

Fen is 23 years old when Dan leaves for a month.

Dan does not take him with him to Munich. Instead he leaves him in the city with Adriana.

 _He misses Dan._

It’s a long month and Adriana is… _cold_ but he does what she tells him to do because Dan said to do it.

He misses Dan but when she tells him to eat, _he eats_.

When she tells him to sleep, _he sleeps_.

When she tells him to be good, keep that toy in his ass, eat her out, fuck her, he does.

 _He’s good._

 _He keeps that toy in his ass._

 _He eats her out._

 _He fucks her._

And he doesn’t talk because she doesn’t _want_ him to.

He’s twenty-three and so excited when Dan comes back from Munich that he feels _dizzy_.

He’s twenty-three when Dan looks at him and sees that a _scratch_ on the skin between his cock and his ass looks _infected_.

Dan’s _furious_ at him and tells him to get in the shower.

Cold water.

Ice cold.

So cold that it _burns_ where it hits him.

He stays there until Dan tells him to get out.

 _He doesn’t tell him that for two hours._

He stays in the shower, shivering and burning and _guilty_ , watching ice-cold water run tracks along the white lines that are still fresh and crisp, on his stomach, on his arms, on his legs and his fingers until Dan tells him to get out and put on clothes so he can take him to a doctor.

His _**mistake**_ , his _fault_ , his **_mistake_**.

He let Dan down. He wasn’t _good_.

He tried to be good. but _not enough_.

…

He kisses my wrist, just there, but the plastic bracelet that says _Leto Aucoin_ gets in the way between his lips and my skin.

“They said it went well,” he says quietly, “Everything’s fine.”

I can’t move, can’t roll over, lying here full of morphine.

And more metal. _New metal._

I need to say something, “Doesn’t feel fine yet.”

He smiles and kisses my wrist again.

I fall asleep and wake up and fall asleep and wake up and fall asleep.

I watch him sleep in a chair when I wake up.

The silver in his beard and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes; _Hawke_.

He told me he’d stay with me in the hospital.

I said he didn’t have to. He’s been… frustrated with me. We fought. He said that I hadn’t been doing enough to _prevent_ this from _needing_ to happen. I told him it was always going to happen.

The night before surgery he was still frustrated, still mad, still thought that I could have prevented this, but he said that he had every intention of spending _every day_ he has with me.

“And I hope that’s a lot of goddamn days,” he said, “ _thousands_ and _thousands_.”

I think he thought I was already asleep when I heard him say that _even thousands and thousands_ would _still be not enough._


	15. O is for Over.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning in effect - O_O D/s, Dub-Con. Ouch-Feels.

He is twenty-four when it ends.

 _Everything was different that time._

Dan left him here in the back room of this party, _left him_ , didn’t _watch_ and didn’t say _be good_.

He lost track after the fifth man.

Lost.

Track.

Didn’t.

Matter.

And they came inside.

Of him.

Throat and ass.

He went somewhere else after the fifth man.

 _He was a white wolf running over green grass._

Except when he couldn’t, except when there was a cock in his throat— in his throat.

Dan would never let anyone else do that, only him, only he was careful enough, because Fen’s throat is healed but never whole.

He panics when there is a cock in his throat.

Gags.

Heaves.

The instinct to _kick_ , to pull away, to stop is there but it’s so muted, unfamiliar, ignored for so long it’s atrophied that it just twitches there inside.

 _Inside of him._

And when he can’t kick, can’t breathe, he gags.

 _He’s a white wolf running._

And he wakes up to the brush of soft black feathers on his shoulder.

A girl. He can’t see her face, can’t see details, but she’s is wearing long earrings made out of feathers and wiping the side of his face with a wet cloth. He’s dazed, imagines she’s Serendipity. But he knows that she isn’t.

 _I’m sorry. I loved you. I need air._

She helps him stand up.

She takes him outside, early morning, where he vomits against the wall of the house, standing in the flowerbed, crushing closed flowers under his bare feet.

And he understands.

Clearly.

Dan left him.

It’s over.

The girl calls him a cab (she tells the driver his address in the city because he can’t even speak, swallow, say _thank you who are you thank you_ , his throat is so raw) and when he goes inside, into the loft, it’s empty and cold.

He takes a shower, as hot as he can stand, and vomits again until he’s dry heaving.

Until there’s nothing left.

Inside of him.

He’s clean when he comes out and he doesn’t belong here.

 _He’s a white wolf running._

He takes his own clothes, his jacket that’s hung in Dan’s closet like a relic for years.

 _He’s a white wolf running._

He takes _his_ passport and _Dan’s_ money. It’s effortless.

He leaves everything else.

He’s numb and sore and empty but the instincts don’t twitch inside anymore.

Instincts are all he has.

 _He’s a white wolf running._

At the airport, he watches a couple before boarding. Two men. One in tweed with patches on his elbows and a younger blonde guy with black gauges in both ears. They’re saying goodbye. They kiss and the blonde smiles like _summer_.

Fen wakes up over the Atlantic for the first time in years.

He’s not _Leto_.

He’s not Dan’s Little Wolf.

 _But he is a white wolf running._

…

“Over.”

He holds my hips in his hands turning me and I trust him, _fuck_ , I trust him.

His tongue glides, hot and steady, against my ass.

“Fuck,” I press my face into his pillow, “Yes.”

He pulls me apart, spreads me, and I thrust forward into the bed because, _yes_ , fuck that feels _good_ , Hawke.

He knows how much.

Hawke remembers where and how much.

I gasp, the feeling of his breath, beard, face, tongue, buried against me, solid and hot.

 _Against but not inside._

I fuck his hand when he wraps it around me, groaning into me because he fucking loves it.

 _He wants me to come._

He whispers that into my skin, kisses me, pulling this _sound_ like yes, out of my lungs and my heart with the tip of his tongue.

I trust him.

I’m present and so is he, in our bed, with his face buried against my ass.

I come.

For him.

For myself.

I come hard in his hand, into the palm of his hand.

And shudder.

 _Twitch._

Until he reaches for me, arms around my waist and my hips, pulling me back into him and saying softly, softly because he knows that I’ve gone somewhere else when I came, “Over, Fen.”

I come back to him.

Into him.

“Hawke.”


	16. P is for Pigment.

Fen is twenty-five when he steps out of a hostel bathroom in Edinburgh.

He hid. In London. In Paris. He wore long sleeves and coats, scarves, kept his head down. He _hid_ as hair that had always been black grew in bright white, starting at the edge of his scar and spreading _out_.

He steps out of the bathroom with a borrowed trimmer in one hand, his shirt and the hat that he’s worn every day since his hair started changing in the other. He shaved it off standing over a bin and got rid of the last of anything black on the sides leaving just enough to cover the scar where it’s the thickest on top.

He hands the trimmer back to the guy who’s been sleeping in the bed next to his bed.

The guy is young and American, “Looks good, man,” he smiles at Fen, “Fucking _mohawk_!”

And that’s it.

The last of something.

 _Dead hair in a bin._

He pulls on a t-shirt and walks out into the city, pausing to look at his reflection in a shop window.

It’s clear for the moment, light breaking through clouds, and the sun feels warm on his arms, on his face, on the back of his neck.

…

“What are you doing?”

“Hmm?”

He came in while I was taking a bath ostensibly because it’s a Sunday afternoon and he _“got lonely”_ but now he’s been standing there with his fingers in his beard for about five minutes, picking through it. He’s had to pause occasionally to wipe steam from the mirror with the edge of his hand.

“I’m counting.”

I laugh, “What?”

“Seventeen.”

“What?”

“ _Seventeen_ little silver bastards.”

“I…” I let the back of my head rest against the tub, brace my feet against the other end and sigh, “You’re counting grey hairs?”

“Seventeen. Last week it was fourteen.”

“Hawke, it happens.”

“I’m being ravaged by age.”

“No you’re not.”

He turns and looks at me. He just turned thirty-five and, yes, there are seventeen silver hairs in his beard. And more growing in at the nape of his neck that I’ve neglected to mention to him.

But he’s far from ravaged.

 _Well._

 _Hmm._

I drop the book I was reading onto the tile and look at him, “If you’re _ravaged_ by age, what does that make me?”

“A mutant! A… vampire. I don’t know… you don’t age, Fen.”

“I definitely do. Am. I…” I rub my face with my hands, “age.”

“I feel like my body is betraying me. That’s my pigment! I’m not ready to let it go. Shouldn't I get to choose?”

“Hmm.”

“I have to tell you something,” he says seriously, coming over to sit down by the tub, leaning his head on his hands on the edge.

“Okay.”

“I found a grey hair.”

I try not to smile, “You found… seventeen of them.”

“No. No,” he sighs, “A grey hair.”

I break; I _can’t_ help it, “You mean… a pubic hair?”

He nods, eyes fixed somewhere in the bathwater near my hip.

“Hawke.”

He presses his lips together and for a second I think he might _cry_ but he laughs, _hard_ , “I panicked. I pulled it out!”

“ _No._ ”

There are tears in his eyes, “Yeah! That really _fucking_ hurt.”

“I would imagine.”

“Ahh,” his shoulders are shaking, “I kept it.”

I sit up, “Why?!”

“I don’t know, Fen, I felt like I needed to.”

I gasp for air, “Where is it?”

“That’s the thing… I…” he looks at me sheepishly, wiping his eyes, “I pressed it. In a book.”

“What?! Like a flower?”

“Yeah, only…”

“Only?”

“I don’t remember what book.”

“ _What?_ ”

“I thought it was in _The Mists of Avalon_ because that’s a book that I’m, like, 99.9% positive you’d never decide to just pick up and read, but, I went looking for it and… I couldn’t find it. Anywhere. I flipped through the whole book. So…”

“So…” I cover my face with my hands, trying to breathe normally, “So what you’re telling me is that in one of our books… there is one, grey, pubic hair.”

“Just… lying-in-wait, like a dick, yeah.”

“Jesus Christ, Hawke.” He sighs but laughs again when I pull him in, kissing him, “Is that what you do when I’m not here?”

“I shouldn’t be left to my own devices.”

“Clearly not!”

I scratch my wet fingers into his beard and tell him that I’m sure it’ll turn up, however, I refuse to help him look for it.

He agrees that _that’s_ only fair.

“Fen, promise me something.”

I arch an eyebrow, “Yeah?”

“Promise me that when the time comes that I’ve finally succumbed to old age, and filled all of the pages of all of our books with grey pubic hairs, and you still look exactly like this, that you’ll be the one to put me on an ice floe and send me on my way.”

“Fine,” I kiss his forehead, “but I’m coming with you.”

He smiles, closing his eyes, “I could use the company.”


	17. Q is for Questioning Beliefs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning - Abortion.

He is twenty-six years old when he sits next to her on the bed and waits.

Fen was in the apartment when she came home with the test in a plastic shopping bag. She clearly hadn’t expected him to be there; he works in the day, all day, at the butcher’s but he has a cold and they sent him home. She asks him to wait with her.

She pees on a stick in the bathroom with the door closed. She puts it on the counter next to her perfume and sits next to him on the bed they all sleep in; she, Fen, and him.

She chews on her fingernail but stops when he asks her if she thinks it is his.

He regrets asking this immediately but couldn’t stop the words from coming out of his mouth.

She turns her head, looking at him, long blonde hair fanning across her shoulder, “Obviously maybe.”

“Oh.”

_Oh._

He tries to imagine a child.

Not a child. _His._

He tries and he can’t.

She stands up without him and goes into the bathroom, closing the door behind herself.

He is alone, folds his hands between his knees, and closes his eyes.

He’s never questioned it before but he knows then, sitting there in their flat, that at twenty-six, he has nothing to give to a child. To a person. To her. Or him. To them. But especially not to _his_.

She opens the door with the stick in her hands.

…

“Fen, wake up. Are you asleep?”

I sigh and roll over, “Yes.”

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” he kisses my head, “but listen to—”

“You have to stop reading that,” I mumble into the pillow, “Please.”

He’s become obsessed. I know it comes from a good place, that he’s worried about Bethany and the baby and he just wants to be helpful and knowledgeable.

But this has to stop.

For his sake as well as Bethany’s. She texts me every time he calls her about something else she needs to be worried about – ‘please make him stop.’

“What?”

I look up at him, sitting there with another one of those damn baby books in his lap. His mother has started calling all of them the _‘Million And One Things That You Never Knew You Needed To Worry About And The Statistical Chance That Your Baby Might Have It’ Series_. He’s folded the corner of the page down on whatever horrible birth defect he’s found out about now.

He can’t be with her, not until she flies home, and it bothers him.

She is his baby sister and she’s pregnant and alone.

But she’s tough. Smart. Fine.

“What…” I groan, “tell me.”

He clears his throat and reads to me about something that sounds awful; a condition where damaged tissue solidifies into something like bone.

“Injuries turn into _bone_ , Fen. They call it Stone Man Syndrome.”

I sit up and take the book from him and close it.

He sighs, “I’m just…”

“I know.”

“Did you ever want kids?”

I don’t answer him; I’m taken aback by the question.

“I never really did,” he says quietly, looking at his knees, “I… I was Dad for them. Kind of. Sometimes. I don’t know… I tried,” he looks at me, “maybe I blew my Dad-wad already. Anyway, I always thought I’d be a really fucking fantastic uncle though. In the first grade… I wrote a story about what a great uncle I’d be. Mom loved it. She framed it. It was a very short story. Me, personally, I never wanted kids,” he smiles, that wide crooked Hawke smile, “but I always wanted more family.”

I nod, because that’s what I think I felt too, but I’ve never questioned it, or tried to define it, “I thought I might have one,” he sits forward, “Once. For a little while.”

“I don’t know this story.”

I tell him about them, about that day, and a test that came out positive on a bathroom counter next to a glass bottle of perfume.

I tell him the rest of that story.

The decision that the three of us made together.

The decision I always knew was hers to make more than mine, more than his.

The decision I’ve always thought was the right one.

He’s quiet still, until he takes the book out of my hands and puts it down on top of the stack on his nightstand, “You want some tea?”

I say yes, and follow him into the kitchen after a few minutes.

He’s watching the mugs, lost in thought.

“Garrett?”

“Yeah?” he looks up at me, “Oh, uh… I just… I can’t, uh…” he shrugs, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For… waking you up, and for telling you about Stone Man Syndrome, and for…” he smiles, cringes, “for saying the phrase, _‘blew my Dad-wad’_ out loud.”

There’s more there, I can hear it, but it's not for right now.

I kiss him carefully, “How about this… you can keep telling me about, the uh… syndromes and things, but, stop calling Bethany.”

He laughs, tired, and rests his head on my shoulder, a heavily solid weight, “Deal.”


	18. R is for Reykjavik.

Fen is twenty-seven years old. It’s a Sunday morning. He stands at his front door, fingers pressed against peeling paint and wood.

He’s happy.

In Reykjavik he lives in this studio with a green door. The unit is detached from his eighty-year old land-lady’s house. It’s the first place he has every really lived alone in his life.

He works for a butcher. The blood in the butcher shop doesn’t make him feel weak the way that other blood does but it does make him feel… charged. Alert. Alive. He doesn’t know why but he knows it. Maybe it’s the place. The calm of the shop. He doesn’t know. His hands get rougher and he smells like iron. He eats more; meat he butchers himself and fruit and rye bread, still oven-warm in his hands, with real butter.

Fen finds people that are free with sex, with each other, with… affection without ownership.

He’s never lonely.

That, he thinks, was the fundamental mistake he was making over and over; he was never alone but always so lonely.

He sleeps, deep, even when the nights are light and the days are dark. He sleeps. In a bed of his own.

He wears thick socks and starts drinking coffee in the mornings slowly over books, over photographs and maps, over long walks over soft green grass to the edge of things and back.

He buys a camera.

This place is beautiful in a way that he’s never seen beautiful before. Quiet the way that he’s quiet. Empty and full. Rough, unforgiving and calm. Ancient. It feels like the place he was always supposed to come to, that it was waiting for him.

He photographs it because he doesn’t want to forget the color of the light, the shape of the edges of things, his green front door.

The peeling paint under his fingers.

And that moment he knew he was happy.

…

“Here?”

“Yeah, just,” I set down my knife and watch Carver work on the block, “watch that, right there.”

“Oh,” he laughs, catching himself, “yeah.”

His hands look like Hawke’s. Their father’s hands, I’ve been told, heavy, wide, blunt.

Work-man’s hands.

Or butcher’s hands.

Carver never had much to say to me until he heard that I’d picked up some part-time work with an aged butcher in Kirkwall who said he could use the extra hands. I had the down time and initially it made it easier for Hawke to paint more. I stayed on so that he could spend time with Bethany and Grier.

Hawke was delighted at the prospect of ‘free-meat’ (Hawkes are unrepentant carnivores in general) and, suddenly, Carver had conversations with me.

He worked with me when he was home for the summer, which, I’ll admit was occasionally odd but we found a rhythm. He listened to me and the butcher, learned, just kept his head down and worked hard. He was more than happy to do the heavy lifting that neither I nor the butcher could do.

“Meat,” Hawke said with affected clarity at the end of that summer while tearing into a ‘free-meat’ steak, “Meat was just waiting for him. I think meat might just be his calling…. provided he can get over the pun inherent in being a butcher named Carver.”

He’s gotten over the pun; he found a butcher near his school willing to let him work a few days a week and now that he’s graduated that’s the direction he’s going. Here. In Kirkwall.

And we still work together. He works more often than I do. Carver is… different here. Not Garrett’s younger brother. Or Bethany’s twin. Not the odd-one out. He’s good at what he does.

We work quietly but sometimes we talk… not just about meat or knives but politics, history, beer, girls. Places we want to see before we die.

He says that he wants to go to Amsterdam and Iceland. I tell him about living in both of those places, about living in Reykjavik.

I want to go back. I want to take Hawke. I want to see if that green door is still there.

Carver stands back, admiring his work and wiping hand hands on the front of his apron. He smiles and I see Hawke in his face for just a moment… that look.

It’s the same look.

He’s happy.


	19. S is for Solitude.

Fen is twenty-eight and he wants to come back.

Not to home. He doesn’t have one of those.

Not to family.

He doesn’t have one of those either.

But just… back. To some inexplicable place.

America, at least, he knows that much.

He feels the ache to return in his chest on a Friday afternoon, subtle, like the flutter in his heart that sometimes makes him stand still.

He wants to come back to people. On his terms. To step out of solitude.

Not out of need. Not to fill a void.

The void is still there but he’s aware of it now, can touch the hollow parts of himself with fingertips that don’t shake but _pulse_ , steady and strong. He’s aware of himself, of the parts that he lacks, the things that atrophied or that no one ever thought to instill.

He wants to come back.

He’s ready to, then, when he’s twenty-eight with strong arms. Now. Now that he knows how to focus through his lens, knows how to look, knows how to see.

Because as nice as solitude is, he can’t stay forever, can he?

Maybe he could.

Maybe he would have if not for that flutter.

That want.

It makes him stand still.

…

I can’t get work done when he’s home.

I have a workspace in the loft but it’s not partitioned off and the thing about Hawke, the thing he doesn’t realize about himself, is that when he’s in a room, he takes up that room.

Even when he’s trying to be quiet.

Maybe even _more_ so when he’s trying.

I can get work done here, in Portland, in the studio apartment. It’s small, and cool and quiet. Just the desk, the bed, a few pictures in frames. The most colorful décor elements are Grier’s drawings on the fridge door, held in place with little black magnetic circles.

The studio in Portland is too small, and too cool and too quiet for Hawke; when he stays here with me it seems like he has to bend just to stand up straight.

I’m almost done for the night, almost. It’s late and I’m standing in my kitchen drinking a beer out of the bottle. I smooth the corner of one of her drawings – Hawke, Bethany myself, and Grier, of course. Hawke’s head is disproportionately large, disproportionately curly, and he appears to be about three times the size of the rest of us; “Like a happy Godzilla!” he said _happily_ when he saw it for the first time.

A smiling sun in the corner of the page.

I smooth it out with my thumb and smile, feel something tug in my chest.

Before I left, I went with Hawke to a women’s health fundraiser his mother was involved in organizing. It was unexpectedly dull, and the two of us ended up in a garden with Isabela drinking bourbon and smoking (Leandra was carrying; she pressed two neat joints into my hand and said with quiet desperation, “You three have a good time… somebody here should.”)

Sitting in that garden, wearing a button with an artistic vulva on his chest, Hawke waxed poetic about love.

Or… what his father had told him about love.

He quoted his father, paraphrasing Rilke.

“’The point of love is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; No! On the contrary, good love is good when each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and they show each other the greatest possible trust,’” Hawke stood up in the garden, reciting with admirable accuracy given how much of the bourbon that had been in that bottle in his hand was now in him, “’A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom! And development! But! Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.’”

He then kissed Isabela and gave her the bottle magnanimously before turning to me, holding my head between his hands, and saying, “Fen! I will guard your solitude and love your expanses,” he smiled, “Til I die.”

I finish the beer and rinse out the bottle in the sink.

As soon as I’m back at the desk, the skype in-coming call alert goes off.

It’s Hawke.

I laugh. He may guard my solitude, but he’s not very conducive to it.

I smile, adjust the webcam, “Hey, it’s late.”

“I can’t sleep,” he shrugs, “The place is too quiet.”

He takes up rooms.

Like a happy Godzilla.

And I’ll guard his solitude until I die, too.


	20. T is for Theirin's.

At twenty-nine, he takes one deliberate step backwards.

Fen lives in Kirkwall and works in an independent bookstore with an extensive travel section. He has a name-tag in a locker but he never wears it. It says _Leto_ and it feels like a lie; he answers quicker to _Fen_ than he does to that name.

He steps back from Andy in the Nutrition Section where they are standing alone on a Tuesday morning. It’s early and the only customers inside are the regulars who wait by the door for one or both of them to open the store from the inside.

Andy bought him coffee this morning, and not for the first time. He had it when he arrived with the keys. A white paper cup with red letters and a crossbow logo.

Fen likes Theirin’s.

He likes Alistair and Elissa who own the store.

Fen likes Andy, who he opens with but…

He talks about his novel too much but that’s not the reason Fen’s not interested. He doesn’t actually know why he’s not interested; Andy’s attractive, tall and blonde like summer but—

But…

 _Maybe it’s the ponytail_ , Fen thinks, smirking.

He steps back with his arms folded across his chest when Andy steps closer and Andy, who is still standing in front of him, nods, grimaces then smiles an almost melancholy smile, and looks away.

_Understood, then._

Fen nods but says nothing, going back to the front desk where his coffee is cooling.

It’s the best cup of coffee he’s had in a long time.

…

A four year old dragon collides with my legs and holds on tight.

Alistair, who was chasing her in circles around the front desk, stands upright and hands me a paper bag. It’s heavier than I anticipate.

Grier gets to pick out one new book a month, whatever she wants. She’s building a very peculiar library. There are a few children’s books, but, by and large she prefers books from other less colorful sections of the store. Today, it’s an illustrated dinosaur encyclopedia… one that she most certainly did not find in the children’s section.

“ _Merci_ ,” she says, reaching for my free hand.

Alistair grins down at her, “You’re very welcome, little dragon.”

She replies with a friendly _rawr_ sound and then, still holding her hand, I guide her towards the door.

It’s Halloween today, which… largely explains her outfit (though, it’s not uncommon to find her wearing this dragon costume on a regular non-Halloween day) and I pull in a deep breath of October air just outside of the store.

_That October smell._

I came here on an October night that smelled just like this.

I didn’t think I’d come at all, to that party… but I did. Late.

And he was standing outside.

I smile and bend down, scooping up a dragon who seems to just get bigger everyday.

She rests her head on my shoulder, twists her fingers into my hair, and proceeds to tell me everything she knows about pterodactyls.

I hope that October always smells like this because it’s nice to be reminded in a sensory way; that night, that smell, the way that he looked standing there in the dark outside of Theirin’s.


	21. U is for Uncovered.

Fen turns thirty and he’s ready to leave.

He didn’t come to Kirkwall with the intention of staying and he makes up his mind to leave on his birthday, which he spends alone. 

That night, he goes out for a drink.

He meets a woman at one of the smaller bars downtown. She buys him a drink and makes him laugh, hard, and that catches him off guard. She has a piece of sea glass on a silver chain around her neck that she plays with as they talk, as they kiss under an outdoor heater, and when her fingers slip delicately into his coat pockets for warmth, he invites her to come back to his place.

It’s only then that he remembers what _else_ the fourteenth of February is.

She laughs easily, blue eyes bright and happy, holding onto him by the front of his jacket, and says in a smoky voice that tickles at something inside of him, “How very romantic, _Valentine._ ”

It’s not the beginning of anything. That night is the only night they spend together.

They fuck in his bed, twice, in the dark. 

He doesn’t always keep the lights off but it’s easier when he does. It’s not that the tattoos are ugly... but he doesn’t know what to do when someone tells him how _beautiful_ they are. His knee-jerk reaction is to disagree. She doesn’t ask for a light to be on and he's glad.

She purrs against his shoulder before coming and kisses the palm of his hand after he comes, his head turned away, eyes shut in the dark.

She traces the lines on his body until he flinches away, her fingertips venturing too near to his throat. She whispers _sorry_ and doesn’t touch him again.

He can’t fall asleep so he stares up at the ceiling, listening to this woman with bright blue eyes and a small piece of sea glass warm against her skin breathing softly and deeply next to him.

She rolls over, away from him, and the sheet slips from her side uncovering a long thick scar that runs from just below her shoulder blade to the swell of her hip, jagged, raised… new and still faintly red, and in what little light there is in the room, it looks like a road, or a border, more than a tear or a record… a line without a clear beginning and with such an abrupt, blunt, seemingly false ending.

He thinks it’s beautiful but he doesn’t say that out-loud.

Fen curls his body against the back of her, lightly touching her uncovered scar with the heel of his hand. She doesn’t pull away, move away, or flinch.

“It was an accident,” she says into the quiet in the dark.

He listens. He doesn’t talk, he’s not ready to do that yet, but he listens.

The next morning, despite what he’d planned, Fen stays in Kirkwall.

…

I am unprepared when it happens.

That surprises me more than anything else.

I have spent months pondering how, and when, and where this would happen.

Every time I’ve done this simple, mundane thing I’ve taken a moment to pause… to ask myself, _is this the one? Would Hawke have chosen this book? And if so… why?_

_A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?_

_Catcher in the Rye?_

_The Scarlet Letter?_

But it’s _Dorian Gray._

_The Picture of Dorian **Fucking** Gray._

Of course. Of course. It makes perfect sense. It’s completely logical in a… in a way. In a Hawke way.

And I wasn’t prepared for it. At all.

I forgot, just this once, and opened the book across my chest while I was on the couch without reflection or pause or consideration. That’s the way of it, really, that things are found, uncovered, revealed just at that moment you stop looking for them.

It caught the afternoon light as it fell, beautiful in a way… this one coarse, silver pubic hair that he’d pressed in a book for safe keeping, for preservation, for… posterity.

I’m laughing so hard that I hardly hear him come down the stairs. There are tears in my eyes but I can see him standing over me, worried, because he’s never seen me like this.

I can’t help it.

It’s still there, on the center of my chest.

I drop _Dorian Fucking Gray_ on the floor and cover the hair with my hand to keep it from getting lost again… like it means something so much more than any pubic hair should.

“What?!”

“ _I found it._ ”

That’s all I can say.

“Found what? What are you…” he looks at the book, stripped of its dust cover, “Oh. Oh!”

When I lift my hand, he doesn’t take it right away. No, he’s crouched next to me just… staring at it with the kind of quiet, intense reflection usually reserved for contemplative walks through galleries. And with his chin in his hand, I see another look… that distant focus that I’ve seen in him when he’s thinking what he dismissively calls deep-thoughts (usually about his father) and doesn’t know that I can see him.

“I have so many more of them now,” he says quietly, plucking it from my shirt with wide careful fingertips.

I swallow, breathing more normally, “Not so many.”

He looks at me, squinting, creasing the corners of his eyes, “Hmm. I guess you’d know better than anybody,” he smiles, “I want to frame this, or bronze it like a baby shoe… is that weird?”

I laugh again, watching him examine the hair again in the light.

He’ll tell me, later, that he mixed the hair into his paints… that the hair is in one of his pieces.

He’ll tell me he doesn't know which piece it's in.

But I'll always think he knows.


	22. V is for Viggo Mortensen.

When he’s thirty-one years old, Fen goes to movies alone.

That night it’s a movie he’s seen before. More than once.

It might be his favorite movie, if he thought about it.

_Eastern Promises._

He’s standing in the ticket line, leaning against the red-brick exterior wall of the old independent movie theater. The theater does series… showing either a genre or the work of a director, a writer, or an actor.

Fen has been to every screening in this series.

Viggo Mortensen might be his favorite actor… if he thought about it.

It’s a crisp, foggy night and the lights inside the theater are warm and inviting but the line is moving slowly.

In front of him, in line, are a guy and a girl. She’s about Fen’s height, pretty and wry, with chocolate brown hair to the middle of her back. She smiles at Fen once and he sees how young she is… just a kid.

The guy with her is tall.

Very tall.

With dark messy hair that’s uneven at the nape of his neck.

He’s wearing a flannel coat and talking, a lot, about Viggo Mortensen.

Fen doesn’t mean to listen to their conversation.

He doesn’t mean to smile when the guy, who never turns around, tells her that he’s going to cover her eyes when, “Viggo’s balls start flying.”

He doesn’t mean to try to see this tall guy’s face when the girl wraps her arms around him and says, “Oh, Big Brother, nothing I haven’t seen before.”

He doesn't mean to laugh when they guy sighs, “Oh, jesus… don’t tell me that.”

When they’re inside, the two of them sit a few rows in front of him. He doesn’t mean to pay attention to this fact… but he can’t help it.

Fen doesn’t mean to laugh when the tall guy, as promised, reaches to cover the girl’s eyes with a big, wide hand when, in the fight scene, Viggo’s… _balls start flying._

Fen covers his mouth with his hand and keeps his eyes on the screen for the rest of the movie, ignoring the impulse to watch the silhouette of the back of this tall guy’s head.

When the movie ends, he tries again to see the guy’s face… but the two of them are already gone.

…

I open the door, drop my keys into the dish, and look up to see Viggo Mortensen standing in front of me. A sign tacked to the front of his chest says, “ _Welcome home! I missed you._ ”

“Hawke,” I set down my bag and roll my shoulder before trying again, “Hawke?”

Viggo Mortensen… or rather the cardboard cut-out of Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, was a… gift. Of sorts.

_I brought this on myself._

Several months ago, we were finishing off a bottle of wine with Isabela and Bethany. Grier was sound asleep by then and Bethany was staying over that night. Somehow the conversation turned to what Bethany called, “the List.” Or what celebrities we would fuck, if given the chance to do so without repercussions. Up to five people.

I said his name. Without even thinking about it.

I said, “Viggo Mortensen.”

Hawke was beside me, lying on his belly. He looked up at me, grinning, “I’m… I’m really okay with that.”

Isabela said the Viggo was on her list as well, and offered to make it a group activity, should the opportunity present itself.

“You have a crush on him, Fen?” Hawke rested his head against my thigh.

“I… no?”

“What is it about Viggo?” Bethany asked me.

I shrugged, “I… don’t know. Can’t explain it.”

Isabela, however, could… in graphic and strangely poetic detail.

And I agreed with everything she said. Emphatically.

A week later, I came home to find this cardboard cut-out standing next to our bed with a red bow attached to the shoulder.

Hawke puts him in various places around the loft now.

I’ve found him in the kitchen, standing proudly by a freshly baked cake.

Standing guard by the coat closet, wearing a fedora (I still don’t know where the fedora came from).

I found him once standing in the middle of the bathroom late at night… a surprise for me when I turned the light on.

And Hawke laughs. Every time. It makes him happy.

I hear him, now, in the kitchen, laughing, “He missed you so much!”

I pick Viggo up and carry him into the kitchen where Hawke is waiting for me.

I lean Viggo against the fridge and kiss Hawke.

He’s still smiling.

Still smiling when I lead him upstairs.

Smiling in our bed, under me.

_Bethany asked me that night if I had gone to that screening; she remembered seeing me in line._

_I told her that yes, I was there. That was me._

_Hawke didn’t see me then._

_He didn’t see me until the first morning I walked into Bianca’s._

_I saw him before he saw me but that morning, that was the first time I saw his eyes._

I smile too, kiss him, move with him until he stops smiling and groans under me, mouth open slightly and eyes closed, “I missed you, too.”


	23. W is for Wolf.

Thirty-two.

Fen is thirty-two, sitting on a hotel bed in a city that was never home but where he lived once. Once. For a lifetime. He is waiting for the one person he’s _ever—_

_What, Fenris?_

His chest burns, inside, deeper inside than breath can go.

Thirty-two.

Ten years ago, he was twenty-two.

He lived in this city and was never alone and where he healed but was never whole and he saw, he saw and when he opened his eyes he ran and _he—_

_What, fucker?_

Fen was a white wolf ten years ago, running at night, _chasing a shadow—_

_What, Leto, do you know yet?_

He shuts his eyes tight and feels his face with his fingertips. They smell like tobacco, they smell like him, always, because he can’t stop touching him, can’t stop _touching—_

Him.

Hawke.

He’s never wanted to touch anything as much, as much, as he wants to touch Hawke. More than instinct, more than desire, more _than—_

_What, Little Wolf?_

Fen is thirty-two and, he knows then, afraid.

Waiting.

Alone.

Because a part of him inside is screaming, ragged, a ten-year-old-twenty-two year old part of himself that died in this city, in the shower, in a flowerbed at dawn naked and vomiting, screaming that _he_ won’t come back, that no one would, that he’s too good, too bright, too whole and that as soon as he’s seen him for the wolf that he was, _is_ , inside, under the layers of coats and skin that look human, pass for human, as soon as Hawke sees him like that he’ll never come back, not like he was, not bright like he was, because no one would.

He’s afraid because he’s never wanted to touch anything so much for so long, to not let go.

But he did. Today. He let go and now all he can do is _hope—_

And Hawke is the only person he’s _ever—_

_What, Fen?_

Fen is thirty-two.

And waiting on a hotel bed.

He’s a white wolf.

Hoping.

…

It’s quiet. The video is muted.

I don’t care. I remember what I said. I remember. I see my lips move. Twenty-two years old.

_I remember that broken tooth._

I run the tip of my tongue against the back of the tooth, where I know there’s a fine seam between what’s really me, my tooth, and what was bought, restored, a veneer to make my mouth look whole again, fixed, aesthetically pleasing.

There’s a skinned wolf in the center of the room.

_Subtle, Dan._

A grey wolf.

Dan never got the color right.

Grey not white.

I touch the fur of this dead wolf, run my thumb over the empty place where an eye was… what looks now like a button-hole.

And then I touch the cast.

_Mine._

Hollow plaster. What held me in when my back was broken. Tied me in. Kept my bones straight until they were whole. Again. I couldn’t breathe inside until it was cut to let me out and now, at the sides, tied together again with thick black ribbon.

_Dan tied my wrists together, Dan tied my throat closed, Dan kept me where he wanted me._

_And my bones mended in the shape he wanted._

Little Wolf. His.

No.

Not.

Just an empty cast.

A wolf’s skin with a button-hole eye.

Empty.

_All he can hold onto._

Before I go, I look at the photo again.

The first one. The smallest one. The ironic one. The relic.

_Leto, Fourth Grade._

Hawke saw this. He saw this.

And he came back.

I take a picture of _Leto, Fourth Grade_ and it’s mine, now, not his.

I go, and when I cover my mouth with my hand outside in the dark, I smell fur, tobacco, something metallic… but more than anything else, I _taste_ Hawke.

He came back.

And so will I.


	24. X is for X-Ray.

Fen’s thirty-four being x-rayed _again_.

It’s just getting worse, not getting better.

Leandra’s been gentle, saying _we all fall apart_ , as they smoke together outside (they are both, she’s proud to point out, ‘legal card-bearing potheads now’). The pain ebbs as she recounts the most inopportune times that Malcolm Hawke’s back went out in a way that makes all three of her children smile the way that Hawkes smile when they don’t really want to.

Isabela offers the services of some holistic woman she knows who would, as Gilly said, shake some incense at him and probably make it worse.

Andy’s been quiet. But there. He smiles the way that someone does when they understand pain.

“Okay, Mr. Aucoin,” a cool voice over the speaker, “Breathe in.”

He does. He breathes in and holds still, inside the machine.

And his bones light up. Again.

_Hawke wants to help, but he’s mad._

Hes in the waiting room. He isn’t smiling today.

Not in anyway.

Because he thinks Fen could be taking better care of himself.

He gets the all clear and breathes out, past the pain in his back, and sags slightly.

Maybe he could. Should.

He’s trying.

…

I knew something was wrong as soon as I got in bed.

It was hot. It’s always hot, Hawke runs hot, but this was… wrong.

I turned on the light but he was facing away from me, hunched shoulders wrapped in the quilt and the sheets. He was sick when I left. A week ago. I didn’t want to wake him up. I kissed the back of his neck.

Soaked.

Cold.

Wrong.

“Hawke.”

I wished later that the next moments hadn’t happened so fast. That we’d had a few more minutes in the in-between, in the calm – just a normal night, late, I came in late and took a shower and got into bed for the first time in a week. Our bed. With him. Selfish.

But it couldn’t last.

I pulled back the quilt and the sheet both of which were soaked through; he’d sweated through them both, and the sheet beneath him. But he was shivering.

Hot.

Cold.

Wrong.

He was disoriented. Couldn’t answer my questions. Just stared down at himself, uncovered and drenched in cold sweat, and started to panic. He looked up at me, glassy-eyed, “Fen?”

And then coughing, couldn’t stop coughing, with the dogs sitting there watching him as helpless as me.

The ER was quiet. Nate was there, as he always is.

They did an x-ray because they suspected pneumonia.

_Pneumonia._

I wanted to ask him why he didn’t go to a doctor.

I wanted to ask him why he didn’t tell me.

_I was only gone for a week and, yeah, the wi-fi was bad, and the cell-reception, and we didn’t talk, I wanted to ask why—_

But he was asleep, so I didn’t

So they did this x-ray and, yes, just like they thought, pneumonia.

Easy. Uncomfortable but easy. Antibiotics and rest and, oh God, Leandra is going to make such a big deal out of this, because she’s out of the country with Bethany, he can hear her voice now, saying, _“I leave for one month and—”_

I hear the word _biopsy._

Hawke’s sitting in bed, glassy-eyed, sweaty, and he doesn’t look at me or the doctor. I don’t know what he’s looking at.

I ask the doctor to repeat what he said and Hawke makes a noise, a _No, please don’t_ sound.

But the doctor repeats himself and this time I hear him. Disjointed.

Concern. Mass. Needle. Lung. Biopsy.

Hawke tells me not to tell anyone.

He doesn’t want them to worry.

In the morning, I call Merrill and ask her to check on the dogs.

And then, of all the people we know, I _tell_ Merrill.

_Merrill._

The words just come out of my mouth ( _Concern-Mass-Needle-Lung-Biopsy_ ) and she listens, and swears not to tell anyone else when I ask her not to.

They do it, more blood-work, a needle goes into his lung and comes back out and it’s quick and done, take another x-ray, observation to make sure his lung doesn’t _collapse_. When he coughs and coughs blood, they say that that’s normal, okay, because of the biopsy but it’s not okay, I can’t—

_I don’t think about coughing up blood._

_Or my father._

_Or his father._

He makes a joke, something about Doc Holiday, and I smile. Even though I don’t want to.

We can go.

He’s home, and listless. Not _Hawke_. Not the Hawke that takes up too much room. The Hawke that fidgets. Hawke that sleeps through the night hot but not burning.

He doesn’t eat much and he just keeps repeating, _please don’t tell them, Fen_ , in a voice that’s too thin, _I don’t want them to worry_.

Four days of waiting.

Inconclusive. Another biopsy. Come back.

We wait longer.

And he asks me to take him to bed.

And I do.

Of course I do.

Even with that thin voice—

Because of that thin voice.

I take him, fuck him, a long hot familiar body that’s thinner and full of antibiotics and potentially—

_Concern. Mass. Needle. Lung. Biopsy._

I push him too far that night, but he doesn’t ask me to stop, he leans into too far, into me, into rough hands and my hips, too fast, and my cock, _don’t stop_ , and pain, pleasure and _please take control, please_.

And afterward, we lie in bed together, in the dark on clean sheets.

And he just says, in a voice that isn’t thin now, “I’m scared.”

He fidgets.

I say, into the dark, “I am too.”

I hold his hand. Then.

And I hold it again when we both hear the word _benign_ the next day, a word that feels like a clean light, a flash, something that says, he’s okay, he’s safe, _hold on to him, Fen, but it’s okay, he’s safe_. A white light that sears through me, clear through, like an x-ray. 

I breathe out then and try to hold on.


	25. Y is for Yours.

Fen is thirty-six years old with a sweaty sleeping princess in his arms.

Grier, like Fen and unlike the rest of them, is _not_ a fan of the annual Kirkwall Renaissance Faire.

She was suspicious of the costume they put her in (though she did like the little wooden bow and arrow set Bethany gave her enough to allow it) at home, and as soon as they arrived inside the park where everyone was dressed up, she had a meltdown.

She reached for Fen and wouldn’t let go.

Fen who was, like a wet-blanket ( _thank you, Isabela_ ), just wearing his normal clothes.

Fen was familiar to a two-year old princess.

At first they offered to go home, she didn’t like it, wasn’t going to have fun — but she was fine, happy, as long as Fen was holding her, her arms wrapped around his neck, her bow over his shoulder.

So they stayed and that’s how they’ve spent the whole day at the park. With his assurances that he was fine, that they were fine, the others went off together in a costumed pack, and did the Renaissance Faire routine while Fen and Grier wandered together, veering away from anything that made her too nervous.

When she walked, he held her hand.

When they ate, he stripped the turkey meat off of a bone for her with his fingers.

And she shared, messily, her strawberry shortcake with him.

He changed her, cleaned her face and her hands, and when she felt brave enough, he took her over to see the stumpy little ponies in a wooden pen.

And now, in the warm late afternoon, she fell asleep in his arms. So he bought a watery American beer in a plastic cup ( _not very period, is that?_ ) and sat down with her on a bench in the shade.

“Is she yours, serrah?” a passing wench, with a wooden spoon in her cleavage, asks him.

Fen thinks, smiling, with Grier in his arms that it’d be too much to explain to this wench, _No, she’s not mine, she’s my—_

He doesn’t know what to call him… _not boyfriend. Partner? That doesn’t sound right._

_Lover? No._

_Hawke._

_She’s my Hawke’s sister’s daughter._

_She’s a Hawke, though._

_A Hawke._

And because she’s a Hawke, his answer isn’t a lie.

Fen smiles when he’s thirty-six with a sleeping princess in his arms and answers, “Yes, she’s mine.”

…

“Merrill is beautiful.”

“ _Glowing._ ”

“Showing, yeah?”

I smile, “Just a little.”

I have gone to many weddings. For work. I know the energy and the money and the time that go into them. I understand the machine of weddings. This was one of the few that was actually beautiful.

Not manufactured beautiful.

Not about the dress or the venue or the centerpieces.

Merrill and Gilly got married in the rain.

We stood in the rain with them. _We are soaked, still._

Its dark now, but the tent where the food and the portable dance-floor and what’s left of the cake that Bela made for them is protected from the continuing drizzle is lit up, warm, full.

Hawke and I stepped out.

For a little air.

His side is against mine where we sit on a sloped hill. The winery overlooks a valley in the day time, far from the city, far from anything. Just a warm tent and music and their voices and an endless night sky.

And Hawke, warm and solid against me.

It’s beautiful. Calm. Whole and full.

“Hawke.”

“Mmm?”

_I need to say this._

I grip his left hand with my right, because it feels important, this moment, it feels like everything I have been, everything I will be. Two words said at night. A promise.

“I’m yours.”

He kisses me, mouth hot and open against the side of my throat, closes his fingers around mine and waits for a few breaths. Heartbeats in time.

I feel his eyelashes brush soft against my cheek, voice low, whole and full, “And I’m yours, Fen.”


	26. Z is for Zuni Wolf Fetish.

Fen is forty-one years old when he finally tells Hawke about the little stone wolf.

A wolf Dan gave him that he held in his hand twenty-years ago in New York.

He tells Hawke when they’ve been together for ten years. _A decade._

Hawke’s hands are empty on the table as he listens.

_I thought I knew all your stories, Fen._

That’s what he says in the kitchen, with his hands folded and sunlight catching on the silver in his beard, catching fire in the blue of his eyes.

He doesn’t know all of Fen’s stories.

But he smiles.

This story mattered today. For some reason. The Zuni Wolf Fetish and the dream that he had, that he chased a shadow, that he kept moving forward because of that shadow… today, in their kitchen, over cups of coffee, that was important.

Fen wonders what stories Hawke hasn’t told him.

You never really know all of someone’s stories.

Not even after ten years.

“Fuck, Hawke,” he shrugs, grinning easily, “ _I_ don’t even know all of my stories.”

Hawke smiles again, and kisses the inside of Fen’s hands.

…

Rainy’s holding my hand and I don’t ever want to let her go. Not ever. She’s taller than me, and her hair is so bright and pretty and red, and she knows so much. She knows about Zunis because she learned about them in school.

Rainy picks me up so that I can see inside the case. I see a whole bunch of little stone animals with different colored eyes.

“Can I touch them?”

Sometimes I can’t see things very clear right away and if I touch them, I understand them better.

“No, Leto,” she sounds annoyed with me but she still holds me up, “Not these ones.”

She tells me that they are important, like magic, and that each one means something to a different direction. Like on the compass her dad gave her, the one that she keeps under her pillow.

I know the directions.

North.

South.

East.

West.

“The mountain lion is for the north,” she points at each one in the glass case, “The black bear is for the west, the badger is for the south, the white wolf for the east. But there’s also down in the ground, a mole, and up, the sky, that’s an eagle.”

She tells me that they carve lines into the animals and that they’re called heart lines. They start at the mouth, where they breathe, and go to the heart where their spirit is.

My sister Rainy is so smart.

There’s a woman selling stuff outside the museum. She has little stone animals like the ones inside on a table and I can touch these (she tells me it’s okay).

I pick up a bird.

She tells me it’s a hawk, not an eagle.

_Hawks are messengers, they tell you what’s ahead of you._

That’s what she tells me about hawks.

I pick up a dog, but she says it’s a wolf, like the one inside the case in the museum.

 _They’re survivors_ , she says, _which means they just keep on living._

I hold one in each hand until Rainy tells me to put them down, we have to go home now and we can’t afford to buy these.

She pulls me away from the table and the woman and the wolf and the hawk.

And we go home together, walking real fast, because we’ll both be in trouble if we’re not home in time. I walk as fast as I can, because I don’t want to get Rainy in trouble.

I run when she does.

I run like a wolf.


End file.
